Department of Religious Studies

As writers and artists who challenged American norms in the immediate postwar era, the Beats famously turned to cars, jazz, sex, drugs, and “kicks” in order to think, feel, and express in new ways (establishing American norms of their own in the process). Less notably (yet of equal importance), they were religious seekers and visionaries—Jewish and Catholic mystics, appropriators of Buddhist thought, fetishists of ecstatic expression, and practitioners of a “Bop Apocalypse.” Indeed, the word “Beat” itself is said to derive in part from the “Beatitudes” of the Christian Bible. This seminar asserts that Beat culture and social practice should be understood as an important 20th century transnational US religious movement. In pursuit of this understanding we’ll pair a cultural-historical overview of these Beats with a series of important critical contexts afforded by the study of religion, seeking simultaneously to expand our conception of Beat culture while refining religion’s broader critical possibilities. Readings include literary texts and other primary sources, works of cultural criticism and theory, and religious studies work that spans subfields of religion and literature, American religion, the history of religions, religion and law, and social scientific religious approaches.